The Day My Sidebars and Widgets Disappeared

What does this picture have to do with today’s post? Absolutely nothing but I’m kind of pissy, I really like it and so here it is. On a sweeter note, thanks for reading :)

I am into this blog because I like crafting. Not because I’m a great website designer, computer programmer or something equally techy. Nope, I’m in this because I like to glue glitter onto crap… or pompoms. Those are pretty awesome, too. And while being a craft blogger is SO MUCH FUN, some days you sit in front of your computer and cry for hours because something happens you don’t understand and therefore have absolutely no way of fixing. You lose all of your subscribers for no good reason. Your site is completely gone because some jerk hacked it. Everything has decided to move itself all wacky on the page even though you swear “I haven’t touched ANYTHING!”

My day yesterday started off normally… I woke up like I always do and got on my phone before hopping out of bed to make sure my post that had been scheduled weeks and weeks in advance had posted without problem. I was glad to see that it had. And then a few hours later I get a call… “Hey, A… there’s something really wrong with the blog.”

So I switch over from what I’m doing and get in there to see what’s up. And what is up, as it turned out, is that my freaking widgets disappeared. That’s right, the sidebars read “Add widgets to this sidebar… yada, yada, yada” but my widget boxes just up and freaking disappeared on me. That meant that there was no navigation, no ability to search, no links to find other content or my social media. In a word, it was a disaster.

MY LATEST VIDEOS

MY LATEST VIDEOS

Yup, this right here is what it looked like behind the scenes. All of the widgets that I had worked hard coding so that my sidebars were just to my liking, gone. So I emailed my designer thinking that perhaps this was an effect of some work I had just hired her to do as she was getting the changes made…. But then I realized that while it was the middle of the day here, it was the middle of the night there. Surely she wasn’t working on my page at 4:30 in the morning.

Which meant that there was a very, very big problem. I searched online and could find NOTHING about this type of freak incidence occurring. How special did I feel that I may be the first person this ever happened to? Not special at all I was pissed. I tried to figure this out for FOUR hours and still found nothing. And when it was finally morning in Tokyo, my designer got with me and told me to try something… and it worked… and I freakin’ love this gal.

So for all of you out there with a WordPress site or blog, if your sidebars go missing or your widgets disappear or if anything funky happens for that matter, reset your design to a different theme. Simply choose another and then go back and reactivate the theme for your site’s current design. Nothing will be lost, it will all come back. It’s just some sort of a reset or something.

I wasted FOUR hours and I guess a better moral for this post would be “try not to freak out” and while I’m working on it, that just isn’t in my skill set. So if you have some sort of freaky weird problem, switch to a different theme and back to your current one. It may work and it may not but dang it could really save you some time and grief if it does!

It’s always hard to be calm when you have no idea what’s going on, if it were some sort of glueing disaster you’d be all over it. I find a cup of tea always helps when I haven’t got a clue!
I’ve just been looking at your crafty mess over at The Experimental Home – love it!

Haha, thanks! When the disasters happen I find myself wanting something a bit stronger than tea, but that wouldn’t help anything (in fact, it would probably only make things worse :) I’m glad you liked my mess. It was so awesome of Laura to include me!

Hi, I'm Allison!

I'm a crafty cat lady with big dreams and an inability to sit still. I make it, I live it, I love it. Here at Dream a Little Bigger you'll find lots of inspiration for crafts, crochet, DIY, food, pet life and all things rainbow. Lots and lots of rainbows.